Yeah, if any work is going to be done on it, it will be done on Elm. My guess is that Mozilla are playing around with this to see if it's *really* what they want and probably coming up with some new ideas.

While locking the url-bar and the back-forward buttons makes sense i can't help but oppose the removal of the add-on bar.I currently have 7 add on buttons on it and only the home and bookmarks button in the navigation bar.Some people also have add-ons like forecast fox which add multiple useful elements to it.

Why would mozilla want to remove it? They are shooting themselves in the foot with this one IMHO.

So: I can't break the back/forward buttons off from the location bar anymore? I can't put the stop/reload button next to the back/forward buttons anymore (instead of having to cross most of the width of the monitor for it)? I can't put my Undo Closed Tabs button over on the left next to the back/forward/stop/reload buttons anymore?

I've actually tried doing without the addon bar for the last couple weeks, instead putting all the buttons on the main bar. It's doable, but clumsy. The main bar just doesn't feel like a suitable place for most of that stuff. And I'm glad I don't use ForecastFox anymore cause that would just be a nightmare.

Is this something that can be overridden with a theme? I generally avoid themes since, frankly, most of them look like crap, but since Mozilla seems to be pushing the default theme towards near-unusability with every iteration of their UI, I have to hope there's a way around it. Either that, or be ready to lock it down to avoid the 'upgrades'.

How it will be possible to override depends entirely on how Mozilla implements it. If they modify the current system then the minimum requirements would be an extension that restored each separate element as a button/bar and removed the combined bar, restored the addon-bar and menu support, and then restored the missing features from the customize palette. If they invent a new customization system who knows how much work would be required. Either way it would be well beyond the scope of a theme to fix.

patrickjdempsey wrote:From what I can tell they plan on locking down the urlbar, removing the addons bar, and limiting customization to the space to the right of the searchbar and to that little menu thing.

I so hope that's not what happens. It would be taking away so much, and for what gain? What could possibly be worth losing a key, differentiating feature of desktop Firefox?

From what I can understand reading the comments in the bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=770135#c15 is that the urlbar will be locked down, the addon bar removed like has been said but regular customization will still be possible. Just that they haven't got it working with the new in-tab UI. Am i wrong?

Simple: reduce the maintenance burden, gain product design parity across platforms, and dump very old code and interfaces from Netscape days. When viewed from a corporate product design philosophy it makes perfect sense. It certainly fails the "what makes product X special" test, but if you haven't noticed, computer and software designers have become very conservative lately about acceptable design risks to the point where logos are swiftly becoming the only way to differentiate products. Not very progressive IMO.

Yeah, I know. I meant it in answer to _matt_ (first time posting so haven't quite worked out how to add the original comment). I have tried out the demo and I have to admit I like it. The new menu is so much better then the current orange menu button, should be available on all platforms hopefully and will mean two less add-ons for me to install (one to turn the menu into a movable toolbar button and another to customize the menu itself). Also no more annoying customization window to deal with.

Everything I've read and everything I've looked at suggests that this will limit customization to the space to the right of the searchbar and to the new menu. No addons-bar, no custom toolbars, no moving controls to different toolbars, no rearranging stock controls, no large/small icons choice. There are some nice new features being added that have been missing for a long long time, like a protocol to allow freshly installed extensions to automatically place buttons and automated wrapping of elements, but these appear to be coming at a high cost.